Sept. 19, 2025
Chris Singleton was a gifted young athlete, a standout college baseball player who dreamed of playing in the big leagues when tragedy struck: His mother, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, and eight other Black parishioners were gunned down by a 21-year-old self-proclaimed white supremacist while they were in a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, commonly known as “Mother Emanuel,” in Charleston, South Carolina, on June 17, 2015.
Singleton was 18 years old at the time and had just finished his freshman season playing centerfielder for Charleston Southern University in Charleston, South Carolina. His sister was 15 years old and his brother was 12. A fellow parishioner found Coleman-Singleton’s phone after the massacre and called Singleton to tell him something bad had happened at church.
“I got down there and that’s when I found out how severe everything really was. You don’t really think about how your life is going to change. You’re just trying to get through every hour,” Singleton said, in a phone interview. “For me, I was more so trying to figure out what we – my brother and sister – were going to do. Most of my life, my dad struggled with alcohol, and so every now and then he’d be sober for like a month or two. But he was in a really rough spell during that time when my mom was killed, and it amplified everything. I knew my brother and sister weren’t going to live with my dad because of his struggles, and I didn’t know what they were going to do.”
Singleton, now an inspirational speaker, speaks about the tragedy and its aftermath with such maturity it’s hard to realize he is only 29 years old. The murder of his mother – who raised him and was an assistant pastor at Mother Emanuel – changed the trajectory of his life in a way he never imagined. But as he worked his way through the quagmire of his new reality, Singleton came to realize his mother, an ordained minister, had laid the groundwork for his survival and his success well before her death at age 45. She would pray over him at night, take him to church, where he served as an acolyte, and vacation Bible school, where she was a teacher, and anoint his head with oil – much to his chagrin. He is grateful for all of it, he said. It is what saved him.
Singleton will share his story of his unshakeable faith in God and his ability to forgive his mother’s killer during Lake Junaluska’s ENCOUNTER Youth Retreat, Jan. 16-19.
Pat McKim, director of Program Ministries at Lake Junaluska, said Singleton’s message that “love is always stronger than hate,” plus breakout sessions and “mountain top time away” from their normal activities, will help youth to focus on and develop tools to live their faith everyday.
“The decision to invite Chris to come to Lake Junaluska’s ENCOUNTER weekend centered on that message and giving youth a safe place for conversation to discern how to claim their faith in a world that right now they see as a constant struggle,” McKim said. “It’s where they can discuss things like, ‘How do I communicate with friends who believe very differently than me? How do I let go of ways that I have been hurt through family, school, etc.? Where do I see the love of Christ at work in all places?’”
For Singleton, Christ was with him when he had to face the news cameras following his mother’s murder. “I didn’t really know what to say and how to say it. But you know, my belief is that God – literally the Holy Spirit – was speaking through me in some of those instances because I didn’t have any proper training to answer interviews and stuff like that. And to this day, I do think certain people have gifts, and one of the gifts that I feel like I was given was being able to sustain trauma that would take most people under. I don’t know why I’ve been given that gift, but somebody in my family had to have it, I feel, especially with all the stuff we’ve gone through.”
Singleton was born in Atlanta and moved to Charleston, South Carolina, in the sixth grade, which is where he lives today with his wife – his high school sweetheart – and their three children. His two younger siblings, who he and his wife raised following his mother’s death, with help from an aunt, are both college graduates and living on their own. His father, who he eventually reconciled with, died in 2017.
Singleton spent two and a half seasons with the Chicago Cubs’ minor league teams before being released in 2019. By then he knew he wanted to be an inspirational speaker, much like Inky Johnson, a motivational speaker, whose videos Singleton had watched.
Why become an inspirational speaker even after the Cubs’ administration offered to help find him another farm team? He can’t explain God’s presence necessarily in “worldly terms,” he said, but he knows when it happens and he wants others to know God is there. “For me, when I forgave my mother’s killer, I know for a fact that it was the Holy Spirit that placed that on my heart … because I would have never in a million years said I would forgive my mom’s killer for taking her life because she is Black,” he said. “At the time, I [said I forgave him], I didn’t even know why she was killed. I said the next day at a prayer vigil at my high school, ‘you know, we have already forgiven this guy.’ And I didn’t even know what that meant. It was like it came out of my soul for some reason. I didn’t know what happened or why it happened, but I know that I wasn’t by myself. I’m a pretty confident guy, but there are certain times in my life where I know that it wasn’t me.”
To learn more about Lake Junaluska’s ENCOUNTER youth retreats, visit https://bit.ly/LJEncounterYouthRetreats. To learn more about Chris Singleton, visit http://www.chrissingleton.com or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkhhwOrCZ9g&t=1s.
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